Last week, the conservative Washington Examiner reported that Arkansas Republican House member Bruce Westerman thinks that the GOP should be “in the conversation” when it comes to Biden’s climate policies. Specifically, Westerman wants trees and forest management involved, which might be surprising coming from the party of fossil-fuel-funded climate denial, but makes perfect sense once you remember his political career is funded in large part by the timber industry.
Unfortunately, as great as it would be to find a climate solution Republicans support, it’s hard to imagine a policy that’s supported by the industry that makes its money cutting down trees will be particularly helpful in keeping trees from being cut down.
And even if it were, there can still be trouble with how forests are used to store carbon as a way to offset emissions elsewhere, even when intentions are good. Because as this month’s Bloomberg Green cover story by Ben Elgin exposes, there are big problems with how The Nature Conservancy, one of the biggest and oldest environmental groups, manages its carbon offset program.
The premise is simple enough: companies can offset their carbon emissions by paying to protect forests from being cut down, thereby storing the carbon in the trees and forest instead of releasing it into the atmosphere. That allows companies like Delta, which can’t operate without emitting greenhouse gasses, to buy carbon credits that enable them to say that they’ve reduced emissions.
Here’s the problem though. Sometimes, the forests that are being “saved” from logging weren’t actually in danger of being cut down. So if that land wasn’t in danger of deforestation in the first place, but is counted as “saved,” then no carbon emissions have actually been reduced, but the company gets to act like it’s doing its part.
While most of the Nature Conservancy’s protected land counted towards credits are actually protecting land that would otherwise be logged, Elgin found examples of quite the opposite. In one case, a forest was already being managed as a preserve, and the owners had no intention of selling it to the logging industry. But because parcels of land to be assessed for carbon offsetting (by third party sources, not TNC) are often compared to neighboring lands, a forest’s ownership doesn’t necessarily matter. So if plots around a particular forest are being cut down, that land is also considered equally at risk, and in the case of a nature preserve, just that potential sale is enough to count it as a carbon offset.
In an even more egregious example, TNC sold carbon credits for a plot of land that TNC had already bought decades ago. So there was no threat of logging, because TNC owns the land! But because the land could theoretically be 72% cleared in just five years, they could still sell carbon offset credits to protect it … more.
Which means that Disney purchased 180,000 carbon credits to protect land TNC already owned and has been protecting for 20 years with no plans to sell to loggers.
So yes, that money can (and does) go to improving the land so it can better store carbon. But it’s hard to see how it’s actually reducing emissions to the extent that Disney’s going to brag about it.
If this is what can happen when dedicated environmentalists run a forest-protecting carbon offset market, just imagine how much worse it could be if the logging industry itself is essentially put in charge of the program!
